Great pro-
consul, once more exchanged glances and again burst out laughing, and
continued laughing, rocking in their chairs with laughter, until they
could laugh no more for exhaustion, and the elderly gentleman removed
his spectacles to wipe the tears from his eyes.
Such extravagant mirth surprised me in that grey-haired man who was
manifestly in very bad health, yet had travelled over three hundred
miles from his remote Cumberland parish to give the benefit of his
burning thoughts to his fellow-seekers after holiness congregated at
Salisbury from all parts of the country.
The gust of merriment having blown its fill, ending quite naturally in
"minute drops from off the eaves," I gravely wished them good-bye and
left the room. They did not know, they never suspected that the
amusement had been on both sides, and that despite their laughter it
had been ten times greater on mine than on theirs.
I can't in conclusion resist the temptation to tell just one more wasp
incident, although I fear it will hurt the tender-hearted and religious
reader's susceptibilities more than any of those I have already told.
But it will be told briefly, without digression and moralisings.
We have come to regard Nature as a sort of providence who is mindful of
us and recompenses us according to what our lives are - whether we
worship her and observe her ordinances or find our pleasure in breaking
them and mocking her who will not be mocked. But it is sad for those
who have the feeling of kinship for all living things, both great and
small, from the whale and the elephant down even to the harvest mouse
and beetle and humble earthworm, to know that killing - killing for
sport or fun - is not forbidden in her decalogue. If the killing at home
is not sufficient to satisfy a man, he can transport himself to the
Dark Continent and revel in the slaughter of all the greatest and
noblest forms of life on the globe. There is no crime and no punishment
and no comfort to those who are looking on, except some on exceedingly
rare occasion when we receive a thrill of joy at the lamentable tidings
of the violent death of some noble young gentleman beloved of everybody
and a big-game hunter, who was elephant-shooting, when one of the great
brutes, stung to madness by his wounds, turned, even when dying, on his
persecutor and trampled him to death.
In a small, pretty, out-of-the-world village in the West of England I
made the acquaintance of the curate, a boyish young fellow not long
from Oxford, who was devoted to sport and a great killer.
